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This essay is a very belated response to a " part 1 " published in February 2015. The gist of that essay was a response to a corre...

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

THE PRESERVATION SYNDROME

Just another little snippet I put on HU:

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The consistency with which you've been critiquing the handling of Wonder Woman and the liberal themes she embodies (or that you believe she embodies) led me to create a post-title as a pun on a Freud-phrase with which I imagine you've familiar. Whether you like or hate my pun, that's the context of my use of the word.

My complaint is not that you said Marston was racist: I made the same conclusion in my post. What I will never understand, though, is why you find it necessary to indulge in hyperbolic attacks.

This time I can keep the complaints down to just two:

"To present black Africans as Nazis both whitewashes Hitler and suggests that black people were implicated in an evil regime which called for their genocide."

What genocide? Is there a little moment when Wonder Woman or Steve Trevor yells, "Exterminate all the brutes?" I have not read the full story, but other blogposts lead me to suspect that nothing of the kind is in the actual story.

(2)"Marston’s belief in female superiority and his belief in black inferiority are incompatible. He cannot imagine black women, and therefore, for the one and only time in the Wonder Woman series, is unable to imagine feminist revolution. Racism undermined Marston’s progressive vision. "

If you want to believe that Marston ought to have anticipated bell hooks in 1946, that's your privilege. But I would like to see you supply the names of any liberal intellectuals of the time who managed that bit of fore-sightedness.

Better yet, can you cite even one MALE progressive of the time who descanted on the importance of liberating the females of either local minorities or Third World cultures?

If you can, I'll admit that that intellectual's anticipation of hooksian liberation was way ahead of anything Marston did.

But it probably still won't support your conclusions about what Marston ought to have known or done.